Éloge du mauvais lecteur par Maxime Decout

Abstract

Reviewed by: Éloge du mauvais lecteur par Maxime Decout Warren Motte Decout, Maxime. Éloge du mauvais lecteur. Minuit, 2021. ISBN 978-2-7073-4662-9. Pp. 147. The appeal of this book becomes evident in its very first pages. It is both learned and amusing, non-sectarian and critically pluralistic. It is pleasantly discursive and intellectually invigorating. It is moreover distinctly engaging. That latter feature is nourished in the first instance by Decout's rhetorical decision to address his reader directly in the second person, switching to the first person plural when he seeks to invoke a commonality of experience. He launches his study with a contention that may seem obvious: "[N]ous ne lisons pas tous de la même façon" (7). As we scan that difference, that multiplicity, we identify the "bad" reader, easily defined as that other person, the one who does not read like we do. Decout suggests, however, that bad readers may have something to offer us, insofar as their readings are active rather than passive, and are often animated by creative impulses that we "good" readers repress. He urges us to think about good and bad readings in new ways, inviting us to consider literature in long focus. The examples that he offers in support of his argument are well chosen and widely ranging, from Cervantes, Montaigne, and Sterne; to Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Flaubert; to Proust, Kafka, and Joyce; to Chevillard, Viel and Senges. Bad reading was long considered a very dangerous thing, Decout points out; and if bad readers were easily identified (Don Quixote, Emma Bovary, for instance), good readers were defined mostly by implication. Until the twentieth century that is, and the work of figures like Sartre, Barthes, Booth, Eco, Riffaterre, and Iser. More recently still, as part of a broad reconsideration of readerly practices, certain critics have begun to question those normative formulations, and certain writers have begun to furnish space intended to promote freer readings, ones less constrained by textual prescriptions. "La mauvaise lecture, malgré ses aberrations, a ses vertus," argues Decout, "surtout quand elle est plus sage que la bonne lecture" (67). He points out that bad reading comes in an astonishing variety of shapes. It can result from fetishism, fanaticism, or fantasy. It can be fueled by naiveté or by an excess of erudition, by projection of subjectivity, or by a strained and threadbare objectivism. It can be leisurely in character or aggressively programmatic. In extreme instances, it can be interventionist, seeking to change what the text provides as notionally given—and here, as elsewhere in the book, the influence of Pierre Bayard can be detected, most particularly the dimension of his work that Bayard has designated as a kind of "critique d'amélioration." In its best expressions, bad reading responds more readily to our readerly desire than good reading. The playful, puckish tone in which Decout invites us to serve an apprenticeship in bad reading functions [End Page 221] to leaven more sober considerations. For at its most fundamental level, Éloge du mauvais lecteur is an eloquent, ardent brief for a more mobile, agile, resourceful, creative sort of reading, one that might accommodate that most elusive and precious of readerly attitudes: joy. Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French